Labour Collapse, Music, Tables and Coops - May 2026
The local elections lead to the government falling apart and a new by-election. AI is taking over the pension funds and the tech companies continue to treat their users as cattle.
So I go to a gig and festival and make a dining table.
Diary
Table
The old bedroom is settling in nicely. I haven’t had to re-glue any LED strips for a while.
So I made progress on a dining table.
Getting these curves of pine cut cost was stupidly expensive. They’re bigger than most pine panels. But at least the wood stain and the varnish is already around, from doing all the cupboards.
With the wood stained, and then varnished, and then varnished and then varnished and then varnished and then legs attached and the top varnished and then varnished and then varnished it seems the table is ready.
The two main configurations are the S-shape or the C shape, one maybe better for a meal one for a card game or something. Maybe a DM seat there. Not yet with the keyboard embedded in the arms.
Still need to get some chairs.
Or there’s the corner configuration if you have people who hate each other and need to be separated 😆
Or perhaps more of a buffet situation.
Music
Super Furry Animals
Went to see the Super Furry Animals at Brixton Academy.
Missed this band over the last, what, 15 years since they last played?
Banger after banger. One of those bass rumbles felt like the building was shaking, earthquake alerts.
The classic SFA song has some sweet jangly guitar tunegoing on then two verses in you feel something weird and electronic in the beat and then the wall of noise and beeps and booms hits you in the face. Love it.
Power-ranger helmet, furry suits, flashing lights and strange cartoon alien creatures on the backdrop.
Ending with that first song they ever wrote together, as they almost always did. The Man Don’t Give A Fuck is a masterpiece and that beepy boomy wall of noise is different every time. Whole room bouncing up and down shouting that they don’t give a fuck about anybody else you know they don’t give a fuck about anybody else you know.
No encores. Ever. If you have a finale like that why would you? Prompt finish and out. Staff must love it. Everyone hanging on to that last second then moving on at once instead of hanging around unsure if anyone’s gonna play again.
Looking forward to doing it again outdoors at Beautiful Days.
Small World
Went to Small World Spring Festival in Hedcorn Kent.
It was very hot.
It’s been hot since. Barely done anything other than sleep on the sofa all week.
Spent most of it lolling in the shade with a battery fan barely able to pay attention to the musicians somehow managing to jump about in the heat.
The campervan wallpaper I put up did as I predicted and fell down quite a lot. Had the gorilla glue ready to try and patch it as it fell. The vinyl wallpaper is probably a mistake. The heat swings are too intense. It swells and the glue fails.
Stands more chance of staying up in future, but is way more creased and shoddy looking.
Still, it’s form and function other than that are now as good as it’s gonna get in a van that size. The mini-fridge isn’t worth it. Coolbox just fine.
Love small world though. Proper hippy festival. Mostly solar powered and punk and ska and folk and jazz and that whole stage just for jamming.
Will likely be back there for the end of summer one. Nice that they open and close the summer.
Ukpol
Celebrating Green Victory
Went down the pub for a couple of hours to celebrate the Green victories in the borough.
Despite the victory only being about a third of the seats, they seemed pretty jubilant. This council was pretty much 100 percent Labour till now so taking a third is still quite a victory.
Some people surprised they won and now have to to be a councillor when they didn’t really expect to have to be a councillor.
Would be good to get more involved with the party in the abstract. In actual practice though I’m always either busy or unwilling to really get dressed and leave the flat.
Should at least try and keep more of an eye on what’s going on. See if there’s things I can do to help out.
Local Elections Fallout
The local election results came in and leadership challengesin Labour started immediately.
I wonder if any PM will last a full term ever again?
The proportion of actually-elected PMs is dropping fast. Only one of the last few, and maybe more unelected prime ministers to follow in the next months.
Streeting resigned, but doesn’t have the votes for a challengehimself unless Burnham is barred.
What’s the funniest possible outcome?
Perhaps a four way contest without Burnham coz he can’t get a seat in time, won on 26% of the votes by Starmer.
Making it obvious Starmer only holds like a quarter of the MPs in support, we keep the same lame duck now even lamer,all the challengers are rebuked, and even if Andy gets a seat later the contest is over and nobody has the stomachfor another one.
Not a prediction, just musing on the most hilarious thing.
Which is probably also the worst thing for the country.
Currently looks like Burnham will win a seat and challengethe leadership and go from Mayor to PM in a matter of monthswith only the mandate of ten thousand people in outer Manchester.
I sometimes wonder if an electoral parliamentary system which can swing wildly based on the votes of 30,000 people in a particular district in a northern town is fit for purpose.
Depending on how 10,000 swing voters act, maybe the whole government changes course.
I’m sure it’s fine though, our ancestors wouldn’t have left us a system entirely unfit the the modern age would they?
Tony Blair Rare Intervention
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Tony Blair
Fuck off Tony Blair.
How much more frequent do Tony Blair’s “rare interventions” have to get before the stenographers stop reporting them as ‘rare’?
Seems like he’s suggesting 80s solutions to 2020s problems.
The very policies which didn’t work (but instead ran up debt the state now has to pay) are the ones which can get us outof that mess, which those 80s solutions led us to?
What is it about the AI companies that invested billions of pounds in your funds and companieswhich first made you think they might have the solution to modern ills Mr Blair?
Was it the first hundred million dollars, or did the subsequent hundreds of millions of dollars also help convince you?
Others have commented on his giving up on ’net zero’ on a record breaking hottest day.
His AI companies need more power than we can generate from wind and solar you see. So they are going to want to burn the world and he’s sure they must be right to do that because the UK is only smol and can’t lead.
He is worried China might carry on burning coal even if we stop. Even though of course China is the country building the panels for everyone else to electrify.
China ain’t the problem mate.
Decentralizing control over power: Economic, social, monetary, military, fashionably. All of it. That’s the key.
Not key is having your country subsidize dirty centralized power generation because your AI buddies want a new data center.
The man who committed the country to an illegal invasion and helped murder iraqi’s by the thousands due to being pulled blindly into American wars is here telling everyone the UK should have been more blindly willing to follow the latest stupid American wars of aggression.
If Blair shouldn’t be in a care home for the insane he should be up in the Hague charged with war climes.
And here he is, still doing the 80s thing of encouraging American war crimes.
Workfare vs British Coop
The talking heads are SHOCKED, SHOCKED to hear how terrible it is failing to find work when you’re a young person who isn’t in education or training.
Laura K was surprised to hear that they aren’t in fact all feckless layouts but nearly 90% of them would prefer to do some work for a wage really if only they could find someone willing to do the swap.
A new number is produced:
The state spends only one pound on trying to get people jobs for every twenty five pounds they spend on welfare for potential workers.
Laura K is shocked again.
I see where this is going.
Will the answer be to take money currently spent on the welfare of workers and instead give it to big business to subsidize their wage bill?
Will it?
🤔
Duh.
They want to offer workfare again, a false ‘job guarantee’ in which the state pays the wages of a worker working for a private company.
Tax-payers pay Tesco’s shelf-stackers, and everyone wins somehow.
This plan that keeps coming up is of course a result of the utter take-over and ownership of the government by private multinational capital.
As a result, you can get a politician to propose a policy if and only if that policy transfers more wealth from public ownership into the hands of private multinational capital.
Our governments have become allergic to any idea that the people should own anything at all in common, that there should be any public ownership of anything at all.
Thatcher told them that Government was inefficient, and that’s the lie which leads to privately owned water companies being unable to actually supply water, or keep the shit out of the rivers, because the private multinational capital that owns them all gives not one single fuck except for return on capital and fancy financial engineering.
An actual job-guarantee is a brilliant plan, if you combine it with national ownership of the public infrastructure and a new national worker-owned co-op, you could actually revitalize the country and take some wealth back from the multinational private corporations and into actual unalienable British hands.
Start BritCo: the British Co-op.
The state will subsidize worker’s wages, in that anyone who wants a job is guaranteed one at the BritCo on minimum wage and if BritCo can’t make profit from it then they get welfare money to train them up till they can.
BritCo is owned entirely and inalienably by the workers, past and present, with one share for every hour worked which can not be sold or paid at any other rate. Wages may differ, be more for skilled work than the minimum paid for training, but ownership is one share per hour worked (including during training).
BritCo’s mission is to rebuild the national infrastructure.
Fix the pipes, clean the rivers, upgrade the grid, build open nationally-controlled software systems, hardware production, build green energy, build national wealth and infrastructure and make it owned not by private international capital but by the workers who built it.
The state must not own BritCo. Its workers do. So BritCo can’t be privatized by a mis-elected ‘conservative’ government.
Everything currently ‘royal’ becomes BritCo. Owned by the workers. So do many previously nationalized industry. Compensate current owners if you must, I’d just renationalize it without recompense. Wasn’t really the state’s to sell you mate. Stolen property. Sorry.
I’d make its first mission really to replace Amazon with the Royal Mail, which would become BritCo’s mail service.
Building a web-site to be a store-front for every UK-retailer, with warehousing and processing done by British workers. Building BritCo for the future of the nation wouldn’t even be that hard. Amazon is just a compute infrastructure and software. We need British versions of those things anyway. After that it’s just warehouse space.
Alongside that you can clean the rivers and build green energy and generally a supply-chain that is owned by the workers and not by multinational private capital.
This path is probably not compatible with a rejoin-EU I’m afraid.
Not without reforming the EU first, and sadly that is also an institution basically owned by multinational private capital and in which you can get any policy you like so long as it enriches private multinational capital.
My first draft of National Co-op’s mission:
* Train workers
* Replace Amazon
* Rebuild transport network
* Rebuild water network
* Rebuild electricity network
* Solar energy
* Wind energy
* Tidal energy
* Microprocessor fabrication
* Royal asset preservation, like museums in palaces and the like.
* Reforestation
Makerfield Greens Should Stand
I don’t remember ever disagreeing much with Caroline Lucas before.
But I disagree with her here entirely. She
urged the Greens not to stand against the Manchester Mayor if he is selected
Andy Burnham is NOT good. He is the least bad of a bad set of candidates the Labour party is scrambling for.
When will the Labour party, even Burnham’s Labour Party, step aside for the Greens? Nowhere and never. They will never reciprocate and they will always slander and lie about our Green party.
Burnham has nothing to offer. He can’t offer PR, he can’t offer reversing Brexit, he can’t offer even to get Labour to stand down a single seat at the next election.
The most important by election in the century, with the focus of the world’s media concentrated on one tiny contest and Caroline thinks we should sit down and stand back and shut up?
Bollocks to that.
We need to stand, fight hard, and present the Green case to that assembled world media and local voters.
If Burnham wins or doesn’t win, so what? Labour will still be shit. Burnham is shit. The country will not be saved.
Burnham is a blairite neoliberal brexiter.
I could see a stand-down for Clive Lewis or Corbyn or something but for Burnham?
No. Burnham sucks and we must fight him as hard as we can. Get the green case out in front of people in this unique incredible opportunity to get in front of the media spotlight.
Pick a good candidate and push them hard.
What is it Burnham is even offering to change? He talks a talk about public control over water companies and rail and power or whatever.
But does he even mean actual public ownership? Or just the kind of franchise systems he’s so proud of running the local Manchester buses under.
He’ll stick to the austerity, the fiscal rules, these artificial limits on government investment.
And if he loses the seat? Someone else in the party will surely stand up and say basically that. Raynor maybe, Milliband.
There is nothing to gain from standing back and helping Labour put their most popular candidate in place when their most popular candidate is still very shit.
Burnham Campaign Launch
Burnham was on the radio doing a launch speech.
He thinks the people of Makerfield are going to write the script for the whole UK.
Namechecks every local borough.
There’s been forty years of policies that leave people struggling, that took away jobs, can’t afford homes.
[yep]
Namechecks some local companies and football teams and schools in a story about a football game. He lived here a long time and likes it.
It’s unjust what Westminster has done to this place which makes him very angry.
So the election is a call for change, for these local people in particular, to the economy, education, transport,care, and politics.
More tech schools not concentrating only on university degrees.
He wants to get to the point where the council is building more homes than its losing. New cheap council homes.
Imagine some local person suddenly called to a job interview in the city, they have to pay 364 quid to get to the city. Re-nationalize rail to make rail fares sane.
His dad is in a care home. A local one. Its run for profit. Which needs to change so that it’s provided on NHS terms with a social care system that supports the NHS.
We won’t get those things without changing politics.
Manchester is the fastest growing city because of how he worked with business. He loves working with business too. Public “control” working with business over busses has been good in Manchester he reckons
[I think people generally agree, but I dunno]
Note, he says, how he’s not been dissing the other parties.He doesn’t want that.
[Good actually]
He wants his own party to change too.
A vote for him is a vote to change Labour. To change it back to the one the people used to know. On the side of working class people and communities.
This is not a new journey, he has always been working to make the lives of local people better. Ever since his first day walking into the Labour club when the manager said “You’re on, between the bingo and the turn, keep it short”.
His three word slogan: I’m For Us.
Its a very good speech. He is very personable. Sounds like a normal person not remotely like a robot the way ministers tend to.
It does sounds a lot like what Starmer was saying when he was running for selection four years ago. He hasn’t explained how he can do all that given the constraints Starmer thinks he is under. Which of those constraints are wrong.
That version of Andy Burnham will win this contest.
But will it be that version that’s PM next year?
AI IPO
Lots of people this week talking about the upcoming SpaceX stock-marketfloat. That and the OpenAI and Anthropic ones that will come shortly after.
Richard Murphy has a good story here about why the coming crash will be the biggest ever, and caused by OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX.
Because these 3 IPOs are about to happen, and be massive, they will immediately and right away take up a large fraction of the S&P and Nasdaq stock indexes.
That means all the fund managers who run funds tracking the S&P and Nasdaq will have to buy enough of those 3 companies to make them a large fraction of the funds. Selling everything else to buy OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. Pumping their prices further.
Now the valuations of those companies is based on them being able to do all the jobs really. Which they can’t. Because there isn’t enough water or power, even if they do have the compute.
So they have to crash back down to something that isn’t this fund-inflated price, isn’t this overvalued price where you assume there’s infinite water and power, but is a realistic price much much lower.
And that tanks everything so much the rich will be begging for bailouts because they continue to use to much margin.
Not sure how many people are really aware of what SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic are planning over the next few months.
Everyone knows there’s an AI stock market bubble, and that alone is a reason why the holders of the companies might want to offload some risk onto the rest of the stock market investors.
But these three companies are coming in valued so highly at the peak of this bubble here that they will between them become a significant fraction of the total stock markets.
Which means all the automatic-funds which buy companies in proportion to how much they make up of the total markets will have to buy a lot of all of them quite quickly.
So you’ll have hundreds of billions of dollars going from pension funds into the hands of the private investors offloading their AI stocks, right at the top of the AI bubble here.
Elon and Sam are gonna take 200 billion dollars of the world’s pension money just before the whole thing collapses. They are treating the stock markets as his bag-holders. Which is quite a common move, they didn’t invent it or anything. But the accountants this round seem to have optimized the process. Swifter and faster and on a smaller fraction of the companies than was previously possible.
There will be a name for the economic catastrophe produced by these three big IPOs taking automatic-investor money at the top of a bubble, leaving all the pension funds unable to meet their liabilities and pensioners going bankrupt.
The way the media works it won’t be called a fraud though, they’ll label it like it was an unavoidable natural disaster which just co-incidentally transferred hundreds of billions of dollars from the pension funds to the richest dozen families on earth.
“The 2027 AI Revaluation” or something maybe.
“The 2028 Pensions Crisis”. Something like that.
Hard to fit all that into the one minute tarot readingbut I did try. See ‘releases’ below.
Other Ai Issues
Google Book
Google have a new AI machine for consumers they are calling a Google Book.
I do not want to “move from an operating system to an intelligence system” thanks Google.
I still want my computer to operate, not to intelligent.
I do not want a popup every time I wriggle my mouse to see where the cursor is.
Also “google books” is already a thing you maniacs. Google, the search engine company, has made a product which is unserchable because of a name clash with another thing from the same company already called that.
/slow-clap.
This is intelligence apparently. We’re going to need a new word for actually clever things given all this crap branded intelligent nowadays.
Google are also removing links from their search to make it all AI.
It becomes ever more important that you stop using Google.
It’s been important for a long time, since they removed ‘don’t be evil’ from their tag-line and merged with anadvertising company and decided that they had to be a big evil corporation instead.
They’re giving up on being a search engine now too by the sounds of it.
You can use startpage or duckduckgo or something if you still want search.
There are lots of different email providers.
There is GrapheneOS and lineageos and others for your phone and tablet operating systems.
There is Peertube and Rumble and others for uploading your videos.
You don’t have to remove it all at once, just make a continuing effort to move away from Google, one step at a time.
I’m almost completely degoogled now. Its taken years. It was a good move. Google only gets worse from here.
Wordpress AI
As Wordpress releases their new version with special AI features, I’m feeling pretty glad and smug that I moved off of that platform to use a static site generator when CEO Matt Mullenweg was going mad and suing everyone and their Blocks editor was getting more and more crappy and less and less like a simple Vim edit.
As soon as you turn off comments, and don’t have adverts, there’s not really much reason to generate each page on the fly anyway. What a waste of compute.
Hurray for not using Wordpress!
Revolution
The revolution will not be brought to you by Facebook or Grok in four parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not be sponsored by Google Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude.
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live.
The revolution will not be AI-sized.
If you wanna smoke that stuff then you do you man, believe what you want.
But don’t come quoting that slop machine at me, like it backs up a single thought.
Or worse, like it’s a thought you had.
Here: this must be true, the robot thought it too!
The revolution will not come to mind when conferring with their chatbots.
The revolution will be live, not Ai-sized.
The revolution will be humanized.
I am more against AI slop in chat channels than I am against space-based securities scams.
You wanna do a space-themed securities scam and pass laws that mean the whole pension market has to invest then, uh.. I prefer you don’t but, whatever. You do you I guess.
Let me know your victim’s address so I can warn them?
But if you want to put machine-generated slop in my chat channels?
Now you are affecting me personally.
I think there should be a strong social norm against quoting robots. Doing so ought to be embarrassing.
Chat with the bot to interrogate your understanding if you want? Sure. There might be better ways like a text-book. but it’s undeniably quick to identify whereyou disagree with the average.
To proffer your please-o-bot conversation as any evidence of anything, or to think it contributes to a public channel of real humans who are saying actual human things which are not synthesized by robots?
The revolution ain’t built like that man. That isn’t how you build human communication channels.
Keep your conversations with robots as private as your interactions with porn.
Talk with the robots if you must but nobody wants to hear about that or your dreams.
AI Spy Glasses
Did you hear about Facebook glasses with facial recognition that are going to be letting the company tag the location of everyone who walks past their army of people wearing pervert glasses?
Despite the billions of reasons not to, Meta seems to have created the capacity to turn their customers into a distributed surveillance machine.
Hard to know why people think this company is okay, and that everyone should be their cattle. Rather than thinking everyone on the executive team should be banned from any business activity on ethical grounds.
Whatsapp users. Instagram users. Facebook users. Threads users. Even us Oculous users. Everyone trusts that creep Zuck.
Shame we can’t all go back to running ICQ really. It literally never got better than that. But ICQ would let you do things big corporations didn’t like (for example send large copyrighted files directly) and was peer-to-peer and so unsurveillable.
So they did what they always do. Bought it and shut it down.
Releases
Observers 14
The aliens discover a planet where a rabble rouser speaking in insolent terms reinforces people’s prejudices, whips up the emotion of the crowd,points their anger at an outgroup, starts wars for resources, and loots the state.
Word Cloud Tarot - Ai Ipo
In the coming months SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic will have their initial public offerings: some of their shares becoming available to buy on the stock markets.
Sounds like someone might make a lot of money!
So I did a five minute tarot reading to figure out who.
Watch the show or read the transcript on the website:
https://wordcloudtarot.com/readings/2026-06-02-aiipo/
Reading
Pushing Ice
Read “Pushing Ice” by Alastair Reynolds which is a sci-fi novel about the crew of an ice-mining ship which usually pushes comets around to harvest their snow.
In fact there’s almost no actual pushing of ice in the novel though because the crew are immediately distracted by the strange behaviour of one of Saturn’s moons, Janus, which turns out to have been an alien artefact all along.
Being closest, they chase it out of the solar system and onto the relativistic time-dilated future of the galaxy.
Alastair Reynolds writes long. Seems to go on forever. Been reading it for months. And yet when you reach the end you still want to know what happened to ’em all next.
Interesting hook of how by timing your relativistic journey’s speed properly you can take civilisations from all around the history of the galaxy and put them all in one structure at the end. Gives a nice way to have aliens interacting with each other even which each evolved in a pretty much otherwise empty galaxy.
The politics and factionalism of both the humans aboard Janus and inside and between the other alien species is explored well. Betrayals and manipulations and hiding of truths going on and being justified by everyone.
Felt like the prologue was all a bit spoilery really. Might have been a more surprising story without letting us know in chapter zero what kind of thing to expect, making the path of the captain predestined.
Good stuff though. Nice long space opera.
Watching
Primal
Been watching Genndy Tartakovsky’s “Primal”, which is three seasons of an Adult Swim cartoon, each twenty minutes long, about a caveman and his dinosaur friend who meet in tragedy in Episode one.
No dialogue really, all just incredible animal roars and screams and shrieks and hollering. So all the story is visual, told in the expressions and the movement and the reaction shots, and very beautifully drawn and animated to boot.
Dinosaur is not a pet, she is an equal. Occasionally ridden, but that’s the parts I like least. Seems out of character.
No aiming for realism here. One of my favorite early ones they spent most of the time running from a zombie stegosaurus.
Most interesting new TV I’ve seen in a while. All three seasons are great, though they are in order first was best and each subsequently not quite as good.
Links
Some things I bookmarked around the web this month.
Free The Web
Nobody can sell it. Nobody can pivot it. Nobody can take it public and gut it for shareholders. Nobody can call an all-hands meeting and explain that, going forward, the protocol will prioritize video.
Iran
Professor Jiang Xueqin let Keen do the heavy lifting on the empire question, then came in with the kill shot dressed up as polite analysis: “If you’re going to see regime change to stop this war, forget about seeing it in Iran. You need to see it in America.”
Pause on that for a second.That is a Chinese academic, on British television, telling Piers Morgan that the path to global stability runs not through Tehran but through Washington. That the bloke in the Oval Office, the geriatric grift artist with the Diet Coke button and the nuclear codes, is the destabilising force. Not the Ayatollah. Not Xi. Not Putin. Not Kim. The bankrupt steak salesman from Queens.
And what’s wild is, he’s not wrong.
Gabriel Zucman
Gary interviewing Gabriel Zucman on wealth taxes andthe distribution of the tax burden between the mage rich andthe poor. He was on Novara’s Downstream this month too.
Climate and Media
Imagine that, instead of focusing on short-term melodramas, leading news organisations rigorously probed politicians, day in and day out, about the climate crisis.Imagine that news editors and journalists relentlessly challenged the government about current policies that are bringing us closer to the brink of climate chaos.Imagine that reporters investigated and exposed the deep reluctance and state-corporate obstacles, including the establishment media, that are blocking alternatives to climate Armageddon.Imagine, in other words, that we had a sane media system. That could just mean the difference between human survival and human erasure.
AI
The Atlantic’s argument that AI isn’t conscious has theright conclusion and is mostly good but some of it’sarguments are pretty poor and just ain’t so.
These machines we have aren’t conscious, but that doesn’t mean conscious machines are impossible. I should know, I am one.
Good rant though.
So, given that Claude is not conscious, what are we to make of Claude’s constitution? Perhaps the most fruitful way to think about it is as an 84-page character sheet for a role-playing game. LLMs can generate dialogue for Julius Caesar because many books about him exist in the training data those models used. Claude’s constitution serves a similar role for delineating the helpful-chatbot character that customers interact with when they’re using Anthropic’s products. To do this effectively, Anthropic does not simply add the document to the training data, or include it as part of the hidden stage directions that preface each conversation a user has. The company says it uses the document when fine-tuning the model; this involves an automated process where the sentences emitted by the model are checked for consistency with the document and the model is u…
Fediverse
James O’Brien was on the radio this week asking if the government ought to leave Twitter.
He seems to have finally understood that there is no level playing field there, that the algorithm can’t be used for good. That if it started to do good, the owners would just change it.
He left when he understood that the place is overrun with trolls and moderated only to keep the woke in check.
James blocked me ages ago, and I’d not ring in, but the key thing he’s missing is this:
Elon musk has his own shitposting troll site that he owns.
Trump has his own shtposting troll site that he owns.
Mark Zuckerberg has his own shitposting troll site that he owns. He’s got like four.
The blockchain people have their own shitposting troll site that they own (that’s the one O’Brian uses).
If the government wants to use a shitposting troll site, they should also use one that they own.
Likewise LBC radio presenters really. If they want to use a shitposting troll site, they should probably use one that they own and moderate themselves.
And then, consensually, with no obligation, if they want, each of the shitposting troll sites can federate together with the others in a mesh, so that they can talk to each other and the conversation can flow between them but ownership and control is distributed to individual organisations.
Then we could decentralize ownership of the means of communication and avoid this argument about whether the government should be on twitter so we can instead argue whether UK Social should block or federate with Musk’s Nazi Troll site or not.
And this system exists of course. LBC could have their own shitposting troll site by the end of next week and moderate it as they see fit.
Here’s some stuff I boosted on it in May.
Fediverse
This from #FindOutMedia is really important. It’s another example of the #findoutMediaPodcast folks building their following directly on the open social web: a network they own, that can’t be taken away by Zuckerberg,Musk or by Google’s or YouTube’s latest algorithm. They just launched their own fedi server, and dedicated mobile apps, and each new account joining there is automatically bridged over to BlueSky. This is the model to keep an eye on. Everyone else with… 🧵 1/3 https://findout.media/public/local
My latest blog post in the “Million Fediverses” series:
https://jaz.co.uk/2026/05/12/there-are-a-million-fediverses-some-of-them-are-louder-than-others/
I know that the non-corporate web exists, because here I am on Fedi.
Google searches mostly bring me results from what is effectively a different Internet: an empty corporate wasteland. Google doesn’t want me to find anything else.
To clarify: the real shift Holos explores is identity portability. With your own domain, your account is no longer tied to a single instance or platform. You can move, switch, evolve, the identity stays yours.
Switching with one tap between video, photo or blogging is just cosmetic. But the fediverse allows it natively. That’s what’s missing today. You don’t need a lookalike platform to tell you what kind of content you’re allowed to see or share.
Enclosing The Means Of Computation
Apple and Google are gradually expanding their use of hardware-based attestation. They’re convincing a growing number of services to adopt it. Google’s Play Integrity API and Apple’s App Attest API are very similar. Apple brought it to the web via Privacy Pass, which Google intends on doing too.
Blender Open Movie
Our movie is now online!
Privacy
When you hear that someone is a “privacy professional”, you know two things about them:
- That they work in the field of privacy
- That someone pays them to do that
So ask:
Who is paying you?
(Always follow the money.)
Based on the answer, you’ll know whether their job is to protect your privacy or to find ways of legitimising their employer’s business model that’s predicated on violating your privacy.
Also, ask yourself: who has the most money?
Then you’ll know who can afford to hire the largest number of “privacy professionals.” Hint: trillion-dollar corporations are called trillion-dollar corporations for a reason.
(Wait a minute, am I really saying that most “privacy professionals” are hired to help corporations violate your privacy, not protect it? That’s a yes.)
Finally, have a little read up on “revolving doors” to understand that for some of these “privacy professionals”, a job is just a job and they will happily flip between the two because, really, it’s all just a game to some people when you have a certain level of privilege.
…
The security industry is somewhat unique. It’s probably the only industry created by the worker as a threat. If you talk to hackers who were in the scene before Operation Sundevil, you’ll realize that it’s always been a Bullshit Job.
Folks in L0ft and cDc were hacking companies and basically blackmailing them into paying for their services. Operation Sundevil “straightened up” the industry. Some people went to prison, some people build security services companies. Pretty much anyone who actually believed in the manifesto was locked up or edged out.
Using the Graeber framework here, hackers are partially duct tapers and partially goons. The critical thing here is that the industry was basically created to give money to people who would otherwise destroy the system.
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Wikipedia
One of my most reboosted notes was the one saying No more donations to Wikipedia until their entire staff is unionized then.
Ideally also the management fired.
Due to Them firing unionzers.
A solidarity union, wwu@social.wikiworkersunited.org joined the Fediverse:
Hello, world!
We’re Wiki Workers United, a global solidarity union for the staff of the Wikimedia Foundation.
This account will share updates on our organizing effort, relevant news/info, and maybe the occasional meme. We promise to keep posting volume reasonably chill.
More info here: